Prodigious research informs a lively contribution to women’s history.
Women on parade.
Feminist historian McElya uses the 1968 Miss America pageant as an anchor for a wide-ranging, comprehensive cultural history of the anti-war, civil rights, and women’s liberation movements that converged to protest the event. Drawing on a wealth of sources—including memoirs, published interviews, biographies, and histories—McElya recounts the origins and activities of the many contingencies that roiled American society: the National Organization for Women, National Women’s Party, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, Jeannette Rankin Brigade, NAACP, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Students for a Democratic Society, Yippies, Miss Black America Pageant Organization, and several factions of the women’s liberation movement. Hardly cohesive and often fractious, the movement comprised three main blocs that competed to set goals: “One faction thought the women should meet primarily as a reading and study group to better understand the sources of their oppression and build the theoretical foundations for liberation; another faction urged focusing mostly on direct-action protests; and the third faction…argued that the foundations for liberation would be found only through consciousness raising (CR), which should be the core of the group’s work.” They were united, however, over their view of the cultural significance of the pageant, which they believed demeaned and trivialized women. McElya traces the history of the pageant, from its beginnings in post-World War I America, when it mirrored the “anti-radicalism” and “anti-immigrant politics” of mainstream America; Bess Myerson, the first Jewish winner, in 1945, confronted unabashed antisemitism. The Miss Black America Pageant, protesting the event’s long history of racism, augmented the scope of women’s anger. McElya’s narrative is well-populated with activists (liberal and conservative), politicians (and their wives), reporters, and pageant contestants, among a huge cast.
Prodigious research informs a lively contribution to women’s history.Pub Date: July 28, 2026
ISBN: 9781982166762
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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